Charlie Kaufman

7+(3+,/2623+<2) &+$5/,(.$8)0$1 Edited by David LaRocca THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY LaRocca Kaufman book.indb 3 12/15/2010 8:45:12 AM &+$5/,(.$8)0$16&5((1:5,7(5 K. L. Evans Does the !lm Adaptation, written by Charlie Kaufman and featuring a protagonist named Charlie Kaufman, chronicle Charlie Kaufman’s actual experience? Is it memoir? Undoubtedly the predicament that so overtaxes the character Charlie Kaufman (Nicolas Cage), his great e"ort to fashion meditative journalism into a feature !lm, is analogous to the di#cult, unpleasant, and embarrassing situation the real Charlie Kaufman !nds himself in. Before it becomes the stu" of his !ction, Kaufman has in fact been hired to adapt for the screen Susan Orlean’s !e Orchid !ief, and in his imaginative rendering of this event a writer’s false starts, his confusion about the nature of his project, are truthfully depicted. In evidence, too, is something of Kaufman’s own morti!cation about his professional position or standing—hagrin deeper than that occasioned by obligation, by his having accepted an advance for work he said he could do.1 For Kaufman, taking on the orchid script means confronting a problem bigger than the task at hand. If he is going to continue to exist as a Hollywood screenwriter, if he’s going to survive or remain relevant in the economically driven moviemaking “industry,” he must show why imaginative writing (even—or especially—in !lms, where the temptation to think otherwise is great) doesn’t merely re$ect or transcribe Reality—why a writer is someone who keeps his audience in the a"ecting atmosphere of an event whose reference is not !xed.2 Kaufman is charged, or feels charged, with making viewers formally aware of the puz- zling character of !ction. For these reasons we must learn to say that nothing in this !lm is ref- erential. Even the name “Charlie Kaufman” is used to reveal the di"erence between works of the imagination and everything that can or has happened in real life. We can’t say that the Charlie Kaufman who, in Adaptation, agrees to turn !e Orchid !ief into a screenplay is the Charlie Kaufman who, in 23 LaRocca Kaufman book.indb 23 12/15/2010 8:45:15 AM 24 K. L. Evans his independent life as a screenwriter, agrees to the same, just as we can’t say that the character Susan Orlean (Meryl Streep) is Susan Orlean, sta" writer for !e New Yorker, or that Robert McKee (Brian Cox) is screenwriting guru Robert McKee.3 %e di"erence is everywhere apparent. %e di"erence is made obvious by the fact that the names are identical; if Kaufman had based his characters on these actual people and given them di"erent names it would be easier to suggest a correspondence between the story and real life. As it is, the !lm’s audience needs no reporter to inform us, as industry analyst Rob Feld does, that Kaufman is “slight and with a full head of wild hair—nothing like the overweight and balding Nicholas Cage in Adaptation.”4 We already know that Nicholas Cage as Charlie Kaufman is not Charlie Kaufman; and by the time this stale news arrives, we have enjoyed from inside the joke about who should “play” whom in a Hollywood production. When, for instance, avant-garde orchid poacher John Laroche (Chris Cooper) charms Orlean by asking, “Who’s gonna play me?” in the movie about his life, then shrewdly suggests: “I think I should play me.”5 If it’s not going to remain an academic distinction, the contest, or con- trast, between imaginative writing and re$ective journalism should have a kind of life in the !lm itself. It ought to be part of the action––or, more accurately, power the action: Kaufman’s preoccupation with the di"erence between making (poesis, the feat of giving form and pressure to an imagined reality) and imitating (mimesis, the business of reproducing or representing preexisting reality) must be what gives the !lm its tense, gripping quality. %at is the reason Kaufman has included in the !lm’s story line the same conditions that a"ect his life and are beyond his control. In Adaptation, both Orlean and Orlean’s non!ction account of Florida’s $ower-selling subculture, the widely celebrated piece of reporting titled !e Orchid !ief, have actual existence. And yet Charlie Kaufman’s adaptation of this material, the com- missioned screenplay, must also exist, and on its own terms, which for Charlie means !guring out how to dramatize Orlean’s prose without tapping into the “arti!cially plot-driven” master-patterns from which most movies are cut. “I wanted to present it simply,” Charlie tells Robert McKee, a&er he’s begun to lose faith in his ability. “I wanted to show $owers as God’s miracles. I wanted to show that Orlean never saw the blooming ghost orchid. It was about disappointment.” “%at’s not a movie,” counters McKee. “You gotta go back, put in the drama.”6 According to McKee, a story’s drama is ignited when characters’ emotional or intellectual change brings about a big ending. (“Wow them in LaRocca Kaufman book.indb 24 12/15/2010 8:45:15 AM Charlie Kaufman, Screenwriter 25 the end and you’ve got a hit. You can have $aws, problems, but wow them in the end and you’ve got a hit.”) But the spectacle that ends Adaptation can’t be emotionally involving because, in an early scene, Charlie has already item- ized these routine methods of animating scripts, and so highlighted their absurdity: “I just don’t want to ruin it by making it a Hollywood thing,” he tells Valerie, the literary agent (Tilda Swinton).7 “Like an orchid heist movie or something, or, y’know, changing the orchids into poppies and turning it into a movie about drug running, you know?” Charlie is sweating and twitching but sincere, and his observations are deeply insightful: “It’s like, I don’t want to cram in sex or guns or car chases. You know? Or characters learning profound life lessons. Or growing, or coming to like each other, or overcoming obstacles to succeed in the end.” %e essential idea he tries to convey is nearly incomprehensible to Valerie, but not to the !lm’s viewers, who begin to chafe, like Charlie, at the restrictions limiting a writer’s freedom to think and work spontaneously. “Why can’t there be a movie simply about $owers?” Charlie repeatedly asks, and the refrain becomes a way to describe the kind of !lm he wants to make, the kind nobody has ever seen before. “I wanted to do something simple,” Charlie tells his vulgar agent, Marty (Ron Livingston). “I wanted to show people how amazing $owers are.”8 “Are they amazing?” Marty asks skeptically, fairly representing main- stream movie audiences’ aversion to work that departs from traditional forms. “I don’t know,” Charlie replies. “I think they are.” %en, as the hopeless- ness of his task presses down upon him: “I need you to get me out of this.” Creatio Ex Nihilo “Writing is a journey into the unknown. It’s not . building one of your model airplanes!”9 Charlie tells his twin brother Donald, a “writer” who is happy to imitate earlier works, who tries in various ways to convince Charlie that good writing requires learning a set of rules or guidelines, and who, as Charlie’s script orbits ever wider from some ideal Hollywood template, becomes the means of reintroducing commerce with the real world—the world with which Charlie, surrounded by reams of his own writing, appears to have lost touch—the world in which Susan Orlean might really be a lesbian or porn-star junkie, in which people really do die, or fall in and out of love, or say wise things to each other. Forgotten, of course, as Donald coaches LaRocca Kaufman book.indb 25 12/15/2010 8:45:15 AM 26 K. L. Evans his brother in the truth of cliché, is Charlie’s early warning that these kinds of “teachers are dangerous if your goal is to try to do something new. And a writer should always have that goal.”10 If Charlie is going to turn the orchid book into the kind of singular, inventive script he admires, if he is earnest about his desire to “grow as a writer,” he must discover how it is possible to ful!ll his obligation to what he calls “Susan’s material,”11 her compelling, personal observations on real- life events—what in his early stages of writing Charlie calls “that wonderful, sprawling, New Yorker stu"” and later, as he feels himself mired in it, “that sprawling New Yorker shit”—and simultaneously create something that has a life of its own, the imagined world of a feature !lm. He must bring images to life. Or, rather than imitate life, he must make something out of nothing. %is does not mean that in Adaptation Kaufman has taken for himself the role of God. True, at the !lm’s close, Charlie puts the last touches on the world he’s made, an orderly world wrought from an original chaos, by nar- rating his withdrawal from it. And in the darkness of the !lm’s beginning it is Charlie’s voice that brings about the fact of existence by constructing an account of it––an expression of remorse that, o"ered as a kind of apology for his existence, also formally justi!es it.

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